


(Let Your Soul Stand) Before a Million Universes

by emery_and_lead



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Realities, Alternate Universe - Human, BAMF!Stiles, Canon-Typical Violence, Dystopian Future, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kid Fic, M/M, Magic!Stiles, Multiverse, Nobody is pregnant, Other, Papa!Derek, Past Kate Argent/Derek Hale, Pining, Protective Derek, and nobody has been, daddy!stiles, parallel worlds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-19 05:31:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3598194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emery_and_lead/pseuds/emery_and_lead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Derek Hale went to sleep alone in his shabby New York walk-up to the tune of bedsprings and shattered glass—a harsh lullaby from the people fighting below him and fucking up above. He wakes up flat on his back in the charred skeleton of his family’s burnt-out house with a lean man standing over him, face streaked with ash and dried blood, the nose of his rifle trained firmly between Derek’s eyes.</i>
</p><p>In which Derek’s alternate universe self is a dead werewolf, his alternate universe husband is a magical widower, their alternate universe daughter is a magically engineered miracle, the year is 2027, and everything in said alternate universe wants them dead. After they fall under attack, Derek is left alone in the New York of his home universe with a four-year-old half-werewolf and not a clue what to do with her.</p><p>He doesn’t even think to wonder what might have followed them back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Now that I’m coming up on the end of my last fic, I find I’ve had quite enough of asshole!Derek. So, here, have protective Papa!Derek and his plucky interdimensional lovechild. 
> 
> _Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes._  
>  ~Walt Whitman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A house, by any other name, would burn as fast.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The prologue is just Peter and Chris and the Hale fire, but I promise we'll get to Derek in the first chapter.

“Shut the _fuck_ up, Chris. You’re loud as hell,” Peter says, his voice a bare hiss of breath, left hand clamped firm over Chris’ mouth. He can feel Chris’ breath hit the heel of his palm, has to force back a noise of his own when Chris drags his teeth slowly along his lifeline. It’s a distraction, Peter sees it for what it is, but it’s a distraction he revels in. 

Chris shakes him off. “What’s the matter, Hale? Breaking your concentration?” 

“No,” Peter gasps, “I just don’t want the whole fucking neighborhood and _your_ psycho dad—”

“Fuck you—” 

“—to hear, that’s all. If I get—fuck, yeah, like that—if I get dismembered before I come I’ll fucking die.” 

Chris laughs, low and dark as lust. Peter’s hips jerk forward at the sound, and Chris’ thumbs press bruises into the points of his hipbones. “We’re at your house, idiot. Besides, I think if you get dismembered at any time you’ll probably die.” 

“Ha, ha, smart ass. Your dad can probably hear us from here, he’s fucking creepy,” Peter grits out. A vicious thrill trails down his spine when the words come unfaltering, even as Chris picks up the pace. “Just shut up.” 

“Do something about it.” Chris’ voice comes in a low growl, a challenge. Peter lets his laugh ride the edge, just this side of unhinged, and does. 

Ten minutes later, Chris’ moans pick up volume again, to the point where they’re hitting the walls and bouncing back, in that not-quite-echo of a small, enclosed space. Peter jabs him in the stomach with his knee, just hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. 

“What the _fuck_ ,” Chris hisses when he’s caught his breath. He shoves Peter hard in the shoulder, pressing him back into the mattress. 

“Just trying to shut you the fuck up,” Peter says, unapologetic. “I mean, Jesus, what is wrong with you? You sound like a bottom when you top and you act like a top when you bottom.” 

Chris shifts his knees to change the angle and gasps out, “We have a—ah—very progressive relationship.” 

“Then let’s progress. C’mon, fuck me like you mean it,” Peter says, grabbing Chris’ ass with both hands and pulling him in hard. 

Chris hooks one shoulder under Peter’s knee and starts thrusting in earnest, teeth locked against the sharp bone at the point of Peter’s shoulder to muffle his groaning. He forces a space between their stomachs with his hand and circles Peter in one tight fist, nothing but sweat and a steady stream of precum to ease the friction. He gives a vicious twist of his hips. Peter chokes down a shout as he comes hard between them, Chris following close after, teeth pressing marks into Peter’s shoulder. 

They lie there for awhile after Chris tosses the condom, shoulders pressed together. Chris’ right ankle lies crossed over Peter’s left, foot hooked around him, both trying to pretend they’re not cuddling, in their own strange way. 

Peter keeps his eyes closed, even as he feels Chris shift and stand, hears him trailing around the room and rustling through the clothes strewn carelessly over the floor. Chris jabs him sharply in the ribs with one finger as he passes the bed. “Help me find my clothes.” 

Peter cracks one eye open to watch him, though not far enough for Chris to see from his place halfway across the room. “Hmmm, nope, don’t think I will.” 

Chris snorts and rolls his eyes, perfectly unsurprised. He leans down to grab his boxers. Peter stares at Chris’ ass until loose pinstriped cotton comes up to cover it, the waistband fixed in place with a sharp elastic snap. Chris pulls on his jeans and shrugs into his loose flannel, grabbing his keys from their place on the floor just inside the door, and moves to leave the room. 

Peter reaches over toward the bedside table. “Here, don’t forget your belt, dickhead,” he says, waving it carelessly in Chris’ direction. 

“Now I know why I do this with you. You’re so nice to me,” Chris says with a wry almost-smile, and walks over to grab the belt. 

Once he has a good grip on it, Peter yanks sharply on the end he’s still holding, pulling Chris off-balance and tugging him in for a rough kiss. “Hmmm. I know.”

“I have to go,” Chris mutters, lips still pressed to Peter’s so the words come out muffled.

Peter shoves him lightly away and reaches both hands up toward the headboard, stretching. “Yeah, yeah. Go on, get outta here,” he says, the closest to fond he knows how to be.

Chris nods, turning away and heading for the door. After a moment, Peter calls him back.

“Hey, Chris?”

“What?” 

“See you tomorrow?” Peter asks, so perfectly casual—too perfectly casual.

Chris meets his eyes for a moment, and stays quiet. “… Yeah.” He finally agrees, and nods decisively before slipping out through the bedroom door and into the darkened hallway beyond. 

…

Yesterday, if you’d asked Chris about the most terrifying moment of his life, he’d have told you it happened nine years ago when he, fifteen, had been told by Victoria, an eighteen year old and the first person he’d ever slept with, that she was pregnant. He hasn’t seen her since—she’d returned to Texas and her family there less than a week later—but he sends a check in the mail once every month and gets a new photograph in return each time, of a pretty dimpled girl with dark hair and eyes to match.

But tonight, when his father and Kate came in through the front door, smiling in cruel satisfaction and smelling of dirt and wood smoke, he’d never been more scared in his life. 

And now he’s running through the woods in the middle of the night, stumbling over roots and fallen branches, twigs raking bloody lines across his face and forearms. He barely notices as he sprints through the trees, dodging thick trunks and scrambling over any rocks that come up in his way. 

When he reaches the edge of the forest, he almost falls to his knees at the sight of the house, the flames that flick out through the windows like a serpent’s fast-fluttering tongue, day-bright against the dark sky beyond. But he only stops for a moment. Then he’s running full-pelt for the front door, like the devil’s at his back.

“Peter!”

There’s a thick, hacking cough from within, then Peter’s voice calling, “Chris?!”

Chris fights with the front door. He rattles the handle, slams his shoulder against the wood. It won’t budge. “Peter! Hold on, I’m—”

A deafening crash sounds from inside. The porch shakes under Chris’ feet, so hard he can feel it all the way up his legs. 

“Peter!” he shouts, stumbling away before he steadies himself on the railing at his back. When he comes in again, he comes with the full force of a running start, kicking the door down. The wood of the doorframe splinters around its hinges. He pushes his way in and squints through the smoke with watering eyes. 

When he stumbles blindly forward, something solid hits up against his shin. It’s a support beam that’s already caught the blaze, fire licking away at the wood, and he can see Peter sprawled underneath it.

“Peter. _Jesus_.” He shoves at the beam, as hard as he can. At first, it remains unmoved as the blackened edges crumble away beneath his fingers. He adjusts his grip and shoves it away.

There’s a big, bloody bump on Peter’s temple, a white, blistering burn mark spanning half his face, and more blood pooling on the floor beneath his head.

“Peter!” Chris shouts again, voice shaking. He falls to his knees beside him. “Come on, Peter, you… you would never let my psycho dad get you, that’s… that’s not Peter Hale. You’re Peter fucking Hale, you can’t—” He knows he’s crying, he knows it, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care at all. “ _Fuck_ , wake the fuck up!”

He doesn’t.

They weren’t supposed to end up like this. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet, even if their families are bitter rivals and have been for a century. Two old family lines locked in a blood feud spanning over a hundred years, sparked by a petty land dispute during the California Gold Rush. It’s been two generations since a member of one family killed someone from the other, but Gerard has been spoiling for a fight since the day he was born. And Kate would follow their father through the gates of hell if only he asked.

Peter’s eyes are still closed. Chris’ throat burns. He doesn’t know if it’s the sting of the smoke or the clawing, desperate urge to scream, to rage and cry and yank Peter bodily back from the edge, if only he could find a way.

The blazing house around them batters its way back into Chris’ awareness when the ceiling creaks and groans and rains down bits of burning drywall over their heads. Grabbing Peter under the arms, Chris drags him out the front door and onto the lawn, falling back beside him as soon as they’ve reached a safe distance. He bows his head until it rests on Peter’s steadily rising chest.

The fire trucks come just minutes later, but Chris doesn’t hear them. He doesn’t hear anything at all.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here, have a teaser.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It felt like the most organic place to stop, to be honest.

Derek Hale went to sleep alone in his shabby New York walk-up to the tune of bedsprings and shattered glass—a harsh lullaby from the people fighting below him and fucking up above.

He wakes up flat on his back in the charred skeleton of his family’s burnt-out house in northern California. There's a lean man standing over him, face streaked with ash and dried blood, the nose of his rifle trained firmly between Derek’s eyes.

"Who," the man says slowly, his voice low and dangerous, "the fuck," and the rifle presses forward to kiss Derek’s forehead, the jagged edge of sawn-off metal biting just barely into the skin, "are you?"

Derek is frozen. He wonders for a moment if he’s dreaming, but he can feel the metal cold and sharp just above the bridge of his nose. It’s the realest thing he’s felt in a long time.

"You better start talking," the man says, and the suddenly conversational tone is jarring, so at odds with his low guttural words just moments before.

Derek uncrosses his eyes where they're fixed on the gun pressed up against his face, turning his focus to the man above him. His stance is casual, hip cocked, and though the rifle is steady and its aim true, his hands are loose around it, the butt propped in the hollow of his shoulder.

"I'm gonna ask you again. Who are you? Also, I want to know, what are you? I'll take the answer to that one too. I mean, shapeshifter, obviously, but, you know, specifics. Or, how about, 'what the fuck are you doing here and why the _fuck_ are you wearing this particular skin' for five hundred, Alex." His tone flips from dangerous to genial and back again like blinds flipping open and closed, so suddenly it leaves Derek half-blinded, his mind stupid-slow, his tongue still and heavy like a rock in his mouth.

The man adjusts his grip on the rifle. Its jagged end drags sharp across the skin of Derek's forehead and the slow, warm trickle of blood wells up in its wake. The man's teeth shine white against the soot brushed gritty over his skin, like a clean eraser mark through the drawing of a face in charcoal.

"You really want to say something here, man, because I'm not fucking around. And it better be the truth, or I swear I will shoot you. I will shoot you, and I won't hesitate beforehand, and I won't regret it afterward.” Derek doesn’t know what look crosses his face at that moment, but it makes the man snort out a dark little laugh. “No, no, don't worry, I won't start with your head, I'm not a moron. I'll start with your feet, and it's a logical progression from there. Shins... knees... thighs..."

Derek doesn't know what comes over him. It feels dark and primal like anger, an anger older and deeper than the guilt-induced self-hate of the past half-decade. Something raw and fierce that won't let him go down without a fight, even now, when he has nowhere to go and nothing to go back to. He doesn't know what it is, but it takes his mouth and twists it til his teeth are bared, letting loose a growl that vibrates through his chest, just the way Uncle Peter taught him, seven years old and wild with youth, trying to be fierce in the face of a world he didn't understand.

The gun falters, just for a moment. Derek is so shocked he doesn’t even think to use that split-second of hesitation against the other man. Doesn't think to surge up and wrestle the rifle from his grip as he stares like he's seen a ghost, eyes wide, face white beneath the black veil of dirt.

And then it’s too late. The man’s grip on the rifle tightens until his knuckles blanch. “Who the fuck _are_ you,” he says again, and it comes out desperate this time, almost a gasp. The gun presses inexorably forward, and Derek’s really bleeding now, can feel the slick wet warmth of it, can smell the copper-sharp tang.

"Derek Hale," he growls, voice hardened by the anger that won't go away.

The man above him shakes his head sharply, in vicious disbelief. He settles into a fighting stance. His voice is rough, his rifle unwavering. "Derek Hale,” he says, visibly fighting the waver from his words, “is _dead."_


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we get some totally exciting exposition and everything is all just a big misunderstanding. Derek is not amused.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first proper chapter, yay! It contains a very confused (and subsequently very angry) human!Derek being magic!Stiles' squishy little prisoner, but no physical contact, sadly. Like, none at all, it's all very disappointing, but don't worry, we're building up to it here.

Derek gasps out, coughs and splutters through the water dripping down over his mouth. He breathes in air and water and chokes on it. “What the _hell_?” His hair is plastered to his head, shirt clinging to the contours of his chest. With both hands bound behind his back—tied together, to his ankles and to his chair, with thick rope in complicated knots—there’s no way to push his hair away from his forehead, no way to peel the shirt away from his skin.

Derek needs to find a way out of here. If he’s gone too long he’ll lose his job at the gym, and the free membership that comes with it. Not that it matters. It doesn’t look like he’s going to survive this anyway. What good was all that lifting, the endless push-ups and pull-ups and brisk jogs on the treadmill, if none of it can help him now when he needs help most? He feels betrayed by his own body. He can’t even go down swinging.

The man with the gun has put it down in favor of a leather water skin, spinning the cap idly between thumb and forefinger. He raises one eyebrow, unimpressed. “Look, if you’d just start talking, we could avoid the whole pin the tail on the supernatural creature part. This is just me trying to figure out what the fuck you are.”         

“By splashing me with _water_?” As Derek speaks, a single droplet falls from his nose and lands on the knee of his pajama pants.

That’s right. Because Derek is still in his pajamas. He has no idea where he is, and the probability that he will die in the next few hours increases with every minute he spends hogtied to a pitted but surprisingly sturdy kitchen chair Derek doesn’t remember being here six years ago. As he lies dying in his socks, a soaked clinging shirt, and loose grey-and-red flannel pants, even his dignity will be lost to him.

For some reason, he can’t seem to stop thinking of the milk he bought last Sunday morning, now left in his refrigerator to spoil. The expiration date is tomorrow. He wonders if the milk will last longer than his life.

 “ _Holy_ water,” the man corrects. He holds up the water skin and shakes it lightly, as if that proves something. “It was kind of a last resort. None of the other tests identified you as any kind of shifter I know. Plus, the whole wet t-shirt thing looks _ridiculously_ good on you, I’m thinking you were a sorority girl in another life. Another skin, whatever. I mean, Derek’s body has the boobs for it.” He gestures vaguely toward Derek’s chest with the water skin. “Could motorboat those things.”

The words sound like joking and the tone is light, but there’s something dark lurking just beneath the surface there, a deep wild edge of danger. This is not someone to mess with.

Derek growls low at the back of his throat. “You’re _kidding_.” No use holding it back if he’s bound to die anyway. This asshole accuses him of being a _mystical fucking creature_ , ties him to a chair and threatens to kill him, and now he wants to make fun of Derek’s physique. It’s some messed up shit. As if the fact that all his impressive bulk is completely useless here wasn’t enough to kill any hope he had left.

The man’s smile only widens. “No joke, you really are unfairly hot like this. Could give a guy an inferiority complex.” He sets the water skin down on the floor, at the base of his sawn-off rifle where it’s propped up against the wall to his left. “Or if you’re talking about the motorboating, seriously, have you _seen_ the pecs your highjacked bod is rockin’?”

Derek raises his eyebrows. He can’t help it. The man looks like he’s in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, and even people _Derek’s_ age don’t say shit like that.

“Hey, no, you don’t get to look at me like that. If you wanna come in here wearing my dead husband, I’m going to take advantage of that, okay, and you’re gonna like it, or at least deal with it without the judgy eyebrow acrobatics. ‘Cause if you don’t, I can still totally shoot you. I mean, I know you might want to get as much action out of his chiseled brow as you can while you’ve still got it on, but I can take it off. Along with the rest of your face. Seriously, the incredulous act is getting old.”

Derek growls. The death threats are getting pretty old, too, but he knows better than to say so. He may have a poor sense of self-preservation, but he’s not insane. This nutjob is crazy enough for the both of them, squatting in a burnt-out house, raving about shapeshifters and waving a sawed-off gun around like he thinks he’s in some kind of zombie apocalypse movie. “You still think I’m your dead husband?”

 “I _know_ the guy you’re _impersonating_ is my dead husband. Big difference.”

He reaches down to fish a short switchblade out of his boot. When he flips it open with the loud snick of metal on metal, Derek flinches. The man smirks at him knowingly and slowly flips the knife around into a firmer grip before wedging the dull side of the tip underneath his thumbnail, studying his hands as he flicks the blade. Derek tries not to make his relieved exhale too noticeable, but the man lets out a soft huffing laugh and Derek knows he heard it.

Derek can see black dirt, dug out from beneath the man’s nail, clinging to the knife tip. The man wipes it clean on the ragged leg of his jeans. “Actually,” he continues, with an edge of vicious glee, “you should be really happy I’m not considerably crazier than I already am, because we don’t have to be doing things this way. We could be going the un-fun route, I could be beating you up right now. So, you know, you better count your blessings.”

He flicks the knife blade beneath another nail, this time on his left ring finger, movements deft and economical and _terrifying_. His flat gold wedding band shines dully as it catches weak light from the bare, buzzing overhead bulb.

“Getting dragged into someone’s creepy ass basement to get the shit kicked out of you is a few balloons short of a party, trust me.”

As he flicks the knife again, Derek can see the strong cords of muscle moving between the dirty sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the edges of his unadorned leather vambraces, which start at his wrists and end three quarters of the way up his forearms. More muscle flexes where they’re laced up in line with his smallest finger, visible in the space under the strings where the edges don’t quite touch. He’s not big and solid like Derek, but every movement of his body is dangerous. His every step speaks of a lean wild grace. A subtle threat lurks in the movement of his trim, rangy muscles, all sharp angles and straight lines and sinews.

The man snaps his knife shut. “So—”

A bump echoes down from upstairs. Derek glances toward the door across the room that hides the bottom of the basement staircase.

Derek wonders if the gouge on his forehead left by the sawn-off—still stinging as the blood dries along with the holy water—left a trail of red leading down those stairs when the man dragged him from the living room where he first woke. He’d caught a glimpse of it when the man first lowered his gun from Derek’s face. It was full of unfamiliar furniture, tattered and old, probably bought out of garages or found on the curb, left out for anyone who might want it.

Down here, the floor is bare cement, the rug long burned away. All the original furniture was lost in the fire, Derek knows.

He’s been trying not to think about it.

The man looks toward the staircase, too, eyes wide and startled. By the shift in his stance and the sudden pallor of his face, he seems almost scared. Before Derek can really process that, the man looks back at him, eyes narrowing in suspicion.

“I guess I don’t have to tell you to stay here,” he says lightly, looking pointedly toward Derek’s bonds, and laughs when Derek’s growl follows him on his way to the door.

“Wait,” Derek calls, suddenly uneasy. “What are you—” But the man has already shut the door behind him, and Derek can hear his booted feet on the stairs beyond.

This is not the worst day of Derek’s life. And it won’t be, even as he lies dying on the smoke-blackened floor of his childhood home, surrounded by the ghosts of his family, their memories lingering in the very walls of the house and burning through Derek’s head.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers, to their faces hovering ghostlike in his mind, to their ashes scattered across the floor of every room, to nobody at all.

He casts one last gaze around this room, so familiar and yet so foreign to him, blackened as it is with the last remnants of a fire that burned out years ago. The basement is bare of any furniture now, but that corner over there is where his and Laura’s kitchen set once stood. When they were very small, Laura would cook elaborate imaginary meals for their parents and make Derek clean up the imaginary mess, running colorful plastic bowls and plates and silverware under a stream of imaginary water from the blue faucet.

He can imagine the hunk of multicolored plastic that would have been left behind in that corner, melted beyond recognition, a sad, hardened puddle of lost memories and lost innocence.

The wall in front of Derek is where Cora, three years old, drew a rainbow in all the wrong colors, brown and pink and turquoise, with puffy blue clouds at the end. She’d been starting in on a little family of stick figures gathered below it when Mom caught her.

Now the entire wall is black, painted over with ash rather than crayon. The little semicircular streak of turquois wax Mom was never fully able to scrub from the paint is finally gone, lost under the weight of everything that came after.

Derek remembers lying on the rug down here when he and Laura decided to camp out in the basement. Remembers that time she told him such a scary story he couldn’t fall asleep until he crawled into Laura’s sleeping bag beside her.

He and Laura spent those first sixteen months after the fire living out of cheap motels in New York City, washing with waxy unscented soap and dime sized bottles of thin shampoo. They never could afford the suites with two beds. Every night Derek would shuffle over toward Laura under the scratchy blankets, looking for the old warmth and safety that would chase the nightmares from his mind, until the horrors of their lives became just another scary story told in the dark.

It didn’t feel the same. That’s when Derek knew for certain nothing ever would again.

There, in the corner opposite the place where the plastic kitchen once stood, is… a huge, circular chalk drawing on the ground, filled with strange ancient-looking symbols spiraling into complex patterns. Derek has no idea what it is, what the symbols mean, but it looks sinister in the low sallow light, cast down from the single bulb hanging by a mess of wires from the ceiling.

He hears boots on the stairs once again and drags his gaze away from the strange chalk markings, toward the door as it opens onto the bottom of the steps. “So—” the man begins again, drawing the door closed behind him, but Derek isn’t listening.

“What the hell is that?” he asks, jerking his chin a little frantically toward the strange symbols etched onto the ground in the corner. “Are you going to do a fucking exorcism on me?”

The man stares at him for a second, mouth slightly open. He huffs out an incredulous laugh. “You know, I can’t really tell if you’re actually that stupid, or just bluffing. Or if you think _I’m_ that stupid, which, underestimation? It’s dangerous.”

Derek can only stare at him blankly.

The man sighs loudly. “Kay, one, demons mind-fuck living people, they don’t reanimate dead ones. Two, if you were a demon, you’d have been screaming the second that holy water touched your skin. And three, that’s not even a fucking devil’s trap.”

Derek continues to stare, uncomprehending. The man rolls his eyes like Derek is possibly the least intelligent life form he has ever encountered.

“It’s not used for exorcism, genius. Seriously, those aren’t even exorcist’s runes, did you skip that class in supernatural creature school? Creepy crawlers, come one come all to the Magical School of Evil, the only school where it’s legitimately dangerous to miss class. One skipped lecture and you, too, could be disemboweled by an evisceration ward you thought was just your run of the mill exorcist’s ring.”

“ _That’s_ what it’s for?” Derek asks, and the pit of his stomach feels suddenly heavy and cold, as though preparing itself for its inevitable separation from the rest of his body. He can feel himself start to panic, the sour taste of bile creeping up his throat, a strange flat buzzing in his mind like the faint sound of electricity running through a wire. “ _Eviscerating_ people?”

The man looks almost affronted. “Um, excuse me, dark creature of the night, are you really gonna take that incredulous tone with me? Like you’ve never eviscerated someone before,” he adds, scoffing like the idea that Derek _isn’t_ a murderous psychopath is completely ridiculous. Haha, good one, now it’s your turn. Stand still while I rip out your internal organs.

“So you _are_ going to disembowel me?!” Derek asks, and he’s really panicking now, straining at his bonds, his breath coming fast and short and out of his control. “You’re _insane_.”

“What, can you _smell_ the crazy on me?” He laughs a little, and it’s never sounded so sinister. “See, if you were really Derek, as you so insist, you’d know that’s not true. Crazy doesn’t have a scent.” He smiles, all teeth, and Derek flinches back from it.

Perhaps this is justice. Perhaps this is everything coming full circle, Derek about to die in the house he all but burned, surrounded by the ashes of the people that burned with it.

It’s fitting. This isn’t a house, not really. Not anymore. It’s a cemetery. And in the middle of a cemetery, what’s one more body.

He thinks of Laura, wonders what she’ll do when she reads his obituary, her last real living family member gone without a trace. If they’ll lead her down into the cold and the dark of the morgue where his corpse is, make her identify his body like they couldn’t with his parents, the faces burned beyond recognition. He knows she’ll cry, and wonders if she’ll still try to hide it even now, when there’s no one left to stay strong for. Wonders whether or not his body will even be found.

Derek won’t let himself fall under the justice of a world that would break his sister’s heart just to settle a score. It’s not justice if it’s taking away everything Laura has left. Laura lost her whole world, same as Derek, and she doesn’t deserve to lose him, too.

“What do I need to do to make you believe me?”

The man scoffs again and crosses his arms. “Oh, right, I should totally tell you that, I mean, you have just been _so_ incredibly forthcoming and helpful here, you’re like the fountain of knowledge.” The muscles in his forearms are once again on display, only this time the deceptive power there seems disturbing, makes Derek want to crawl out of his skin just to get away. “You won’t even tell me what kind of shifter you… are…”

The man glances over toward the chalk circle in the corner, and his eyes fly wide, the most off-guard Derek has seen him since he dragged Derek down into the cellar.

“Oh,” the man says, dragging a rough hand through his short hair, leaving it even messier than before. Derek thinks he can see ash falling form his head, drifting down around the man’s boots like a flurry of black snow. “ _Shit._ ”

He turns to face Derek abruptly. Derek stares back, trying to mask his confusion, mind still scattered by the prospect of impending death.

“What was your childhood nickname?”

“I—my—what?” Derek gasps out, his heart beating fast enough and loud enough to drown out the man’s words, to drown out his own thoughts.

“Your childhood nickname, what was it? What did your parents call you as a kid?” the man asks, voice quick and urgent. There’s no hint of the flippant sarcasm that’s overlain his words near constantly ever since he brought Derek down to the basement.

Derek is so shocked he doesn’t even think to tell a lie. “I—Bear. They called me Bear. Der Bear, sometimes.”

The man rocks back onto his heels and exhales slowly, pulling his hand through his hair again and turning so Derek can only see him in profile. Then he spins back around abruptly. “Okay, I know it’s cliché—believe me, I _know_ —and you might not believe me, but really, this has all just been a big, _big_ misunderstanding. I’m going to untie you now, but you have to promise not to try to kill me. That would just be unfair, that’s like the second worse possible way to die, at the hands of an alternate universe version of your husband. The first, of course, being death at the hands of your actual husband, but, well, that’s not really an option for me anymore, so. Please don’t attack me.”

He waits for Derek’s slow nod before he walks steadily toward him, like a man approaching a wounded animal, dropping down to his knees behind Derek’s chair and working at the knots in the rope.

“I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m—I am really sorry.”

Derek is left reeling. Even as the ropes fall away, freeing his hands, his body, his feet, the man’s head bent low and close enough for Derek to lash out, he finds he can’t do anything but bring his hands up to inspect the red lines of rope burn circling his wrists. He rubs the bruised skin and flexes his fingers. He curls them into fists, uncurls them again, trying to restore full feeling to his hands and banish the pins and needles that erupted with the first hint of renewed blood flow when the man started to loosen his bonds.

He could attack the man now while his head is still turned. Derek is the bigger man, sturdier, clearly superior in terms of pure strength, but he promised. And there’s something in this man’s face, a wild light in his eyes that makes Derek stay his hand, out of fear or reverence he doesn’t know.

Derek doesn’t think he could kill this man even if he wanted to. No one else is going to die in this house. Not by Derek’s hand.

 “There you go, big guy,” the man says, and Derek shuffles off the last of the ropes where they’re tangled around his feet.

The man grimaces in open apology and moves as though to help Derek rub the feeling back into his hands, but stops abruptly before their fingers can brush. He pulls away, casting a nervous glance at Derek’s face.

“Um, I didn’t ever actually, like, physically hurt you or anything, so how about we go quid pro quo, Clarice, and you don’t try anything with me. If you’re Derek’s evil counterpart from some sort of weird mirror ‘verse or something—I mean, it’s like the reverse facial hair thing, you’re missing a considerable length of beard there, champ—then I’ll definitely kill you. Just so you know. Only if you try to kill me first, obviously, I meant what I said about quid pro quo.”

Derek can only stare. He wants to growl, but his throat won’t cooperate.

The man claps his hands like some kind of demented kindergarten teacher. Derek hates himself for jumping a little at the noise. “Okay, come with me. I need to do some calculations.”

Derek trails bemusedly after him as the man makes his way upstairs, stopping by a long, pitted table in what was once the family room. There’s a hole the size of Derek’s foot gaping through the floor in the corner where some of the wood, compromised by fire, has rotten or fallen away.

Derek hasn’t set foot in this house since before the fire. Even when Laura had gone back in to see what little she could salvage, Derek had stayed in the car, refusing even to look out the window at the blackened shell of his home. His family’s home.

The table they’ve stopped beside is covered in scattered papers, maps and handwritten data sheets, and what look like blueprints. A haphazard stack of loose printer paper is piled in the middle, covered with those same markings he saw inside the chalk circle downstairs, reproduced in miniature a hundred times over. These are the papers the man grabs. He pulls them close so he can shuffle through them, muttering to himself under his breath.

“I’m Stiles, by the way,” the man—Stiles—says absently, in between the disjointed mumbling. He doesn’t look up from the papers in front of him.

Derek isn’t sure how to respond, so he just nods, even though he knows Stiles can’t see him. “Are you in some kind of… doomsday cult or something?”

Stiles’ head jerks up. He stares at Derek for a moment, and the next second he bursts out laughing like some kind of deranged two-legged hyena. Derek huffs, annoyed, and glares until Stiles gets control of his breathing enough to say, “Or something,” with the most infuriating smile Derek thinks he’s ever seen in his life. And Laura is his sister, so that’s saying something.

He thinks about trying to leave, but he knows he has nowhere to go, no ties left to anything or anyone in California, save this house and one body still breathing in Beacon Hills General. Two burnt shells left empty in wake of the fire Derek’s mistakes ignited six years ago.

“Why are you in my house?” Now that the haze of fear has lifted, Derek finally has time to think about what’s been going on. Enough to notice that everything that’s happened for the past few hours has made approximately zero fucking sense.

“It’s our base of operations,” Stiles replies, still absent, pushing another sheet of paper aside. Derek slides it across the tabletop so he can see the cramped writing slanting across it in a gridlock, crammed upside down and sideways into whatever spaces the writer could find a way to fit it. He can make out long, messy strings of numbers, complex equations interspersed with those same strange symbols from the floor downstairs.

“Why is your headquarters based in a burnt-out building that could fall apart around you at any second?”

Stiles scoffs, finally glancing up at him, all the better for Derek to see his eyebrow arch condescendingly. “This thing is warded against the apocalypse. Literally, the apocalypse, because at this point we’ve reached a level of mutually assured destruction that would make Dr. Strangelove piss himself. Which is why—aha!” he yells, and jabs a triumphant finger at a line of numbers and strange symbols—runes, he’d called them—on the piece of paper now before him, around a third of the way through his pile.

“What?” Derek huffs, grudgingly curious despite himself.

“This line of—well, code? I guess that’s what it is, except code for programming wards instead of computers—this is where I went wrong. In the immortal words of Allen C Deaton—just kidding, I have no clue what Deaton’s middle name is, I made that up, it can stand for ‘Cryptic’—if something goes wrong, ‘it’s not the magic, it’s the conduit.’”

Stiles grabs a pencil from an old repurposed soup can just off the center of the table, forgoing the pen that’s leaking steadily onto the cover of a manila folder by his elbow.

“I just need to… adjust… and then… the directionality of the… hmm, ah… no, that’s not… yeah… yeah, and… frequency specifications…” He goes back to muttering, hunching down over the paper and scratching things out, scribbling in the margins, cramming calculations in wherever he can fit them.

“Did you say _magic_?” Derek asks slowly, voice low and dark. This just keeps getting stranger and stranger, and Derek is a man of action, but he has no idea what to do. He hates when he’s confronted with things he doesn’t understand, hates not knowing enough about a situation to trust even his own instincts.

“I did indeed, sourwolf. I did indeed,” Stiles says, smirking when Derek’s scowl only deepens.

Stiles steps back from the table and, with a quick flick of the wrist, sets the leaking ballpoint pen on fire. Derek jumps back several feet and tells himself he only does it to get away from the flames. Derek doesn’t think Stiles is fooled, though, because when he glances over at Derek, his mouth twists into something deeply apologetic—too apologetic to be warranted simply by startling someone—and snaps his fingers. Just as quickly, the fire goes out, leaving a puddle of melted blue plastic stuck like a tumor to the front of the manila folder.

“I’m like, ninety nine percent sure that folder didn’t have anything important in it,” he says speculatively, and Derek can only stare. Stiles sees the look on his face and cracks his widest smile yet. “You’re not in Kansas anymore, Kujo.” Derek gives him a flat look, but Stiles just keeps smiling. “I mix my metaphors like I mix my drinks: with a little skill and a whole lotta style. Really, I just didn’t think you and Toto was a fair comparison. Not with that frown, anyway.”

Derek stares at him blankly. He has it on good authority—Laura’s authority, which is practically absolute as far as Derek is concerned—that his blank look is the rough equivalent of anyone else’s death glare.

“For the purpose of this comparison, your Oz is a completely different universe,” Stiles says, unfazed. Of course he is. “Congratulations, you are traversing the multiverse, please keep all arms, legs, and any additional limbs inside the ride at all times. I will say, the Wizard of Oz metaphor is pretty imperfect. The twister that sent Dorothy over the rainbow happened in her home world, not Oz, but I’m pretty sure I’m your tornado here. Sorry buddy. Plus, your house didn’t come along with you and… crush me. Lucky for me.”

“I live in an apartment,” Derek says before he can stop himself.

Then he realizes that’s really not the part of Stiles’ rambling he should be focusing on, considering the entire thing was basically gibberish, interspersed with references Derek kind of wishes he didn’t understand quite as well as he does.

“What are you talking about?” Derek growls.

Stiles smiles wider. What the hell. “Wow, it’s just like old times. God, I missed your growly little face.”

This time Derek growls aloud, wordlessly, and Stiles sighs.

“Fine, fine, suck the fun out of everything, you big fun sucker,” he says under his breath, although not quiet enough that Derek can’t hear it. Derek has a feeling that was the point. “What I’m saying is, this is a whole alternate universe from the one you phased out of last night-slash-this morning, I don’t know how long you were lying asleep in the living room before I found you.

“Basically, you took a magic carpet ride—emphasis on the magic—into a whole new world. Sadly, it is not shining, it is not shimmering, and it is really definitely not splendid. Sorry about that. I’m assuming your world doesn’t have magic, and if it does, you seem to know nothing about it. Not that you being completely clueless is anything new. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a multiversal constant.”

Derek wonders why he even bothers to glare. It’s not like Stiles displays any kind of normal reaction to anything, and Derek’s dark looks are apparently no exception. If anything, he seems wildly amused by them, like Derek’s doing something unbearably cute.

Cute really isn’t the effect he was going for.

Stiles looks back down at the papers in front of him for a moment before nodding. “Yeah. Like I said, mutually assured destruction, it’s inevitable. This whole world—maybe even this whole universe—is about to go straight to hell, sans hand basket. I drew up that ring downstairs because I was trying to send us—me, by us I mean me, that’s the royal we—somewhere else. Anywhere else.

“So I set it to random, hoped like hell it landed on Rainbow Road and not the Bowser’s fucking Castle we’re in right now, and pressed start. And then it did nothing. Or, I thought it did nothing, we went to bed—the royal we again. Obviously. What can I say, I’m lonely, let a man maintain his delusions. I maybe cried a little—it was manly crying, very manly—and then today I came downstairs and you were lounging around on my living room floor like some kind of interloper. Which, to be fair, you totally are, but I thought it was more in the rip-your-throat-out way than the lost-Quantum-Leaper way, my bad.

“And I know it sounds like my universe jumping one-ring-to-rule-them-all downstairs was a colossal flop, what with you being here and me _not_ being… anywhere else, really... but this is actually cause for tentative celebration. Yay!” Stiles says, doing sort of lackluster jazz hands, almost like he’s forgotten how to move his fingers when he’s not holding a pencil, a switchblade, or a gun. “Or it would be, if I wanted to jinx it, which I really, really don’t.”

“And… why are we happy about this?” Derek asks, trying out that royal we, because even he can tell alienating his only possible ally is probably not the best prospect when stranded in an alternate dimension. If that’s truly what this is. And really, how else could he have gotten from New York City to northern California in one night without catching a plane? There _is_ no logical explanation, and Derek’s familiar enough with pop culture to know what Mr. Spock would say right now.

Besides, he just saw Stiles do _magic_ , right in front of his eyes. After that, anything seems possible.

Derek would really like to go back to Kansas now, but it appears he left his ruby slippers at home, and his socks are black, shot through with grey at the heels and toes. Not a hint of red anywhere.

“Because it did the _exact opposite_ of what I wanted it to do. That doesn’t mean complete overhaul, I don’t need to start from scratch like I thought I would. I just need to figure out how to do a binary switch and, I mean, they managed it in _Spy Kids_ , how hard could it be? Very hard, probably, but I pretend to be an optimist, it boosts morale without the beatings.”

Derek has to wonder whether he needs an ally _this_ badly, even if Stiles _is_ magic. The sad thing is, Derek thinks maybe he really, honestly does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My ~~sister~~ beta and I are both dyslexic, so please feel free to correct any spelling or grammatical errors, I promise not to love you any less. I know it doesn't seem like a very effective system, but I like her input and she likes giving it to me, so.


End file.
